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Friday, September 28, 2012

The Dr Tabubil Files: Leaving Cloncurry

My
sister, the estimable Dr Tabubil, is spending ten weeks on a rural
clinical rotation in Cloncurry, a small pastoral town in the Queensland
Outback. It's a fantastic place, and together we have collaborated on a
series of guest posts all about living and working in the Red Centre.
Enjoy!

My time in Cloncurry
ended with a bit of a bang. On my second last
day, I walked the quarter-kilometer home to my loaner house for
lunch, and somewhere in the near distance, there was an enormous cloud of black smokeclimbing up into the sky. It was as
near as the other side of town, but I could not smell any smoke in the
air.

A fire clearly, but the
wind was blowing in a northerly direction, and I was eastward of the fire -

I didn’t have the
courage to grab my car and drive over to see what was going on.Bush-fires in Australia are Dangerous.
It’s the triple threat combination of dry air, strong wind, and tall
grass. When the big bush-fires hit, lives can be- and often are -
lost.The worst, and most recent fires
have been the Black Saturday fires that took over whole swathes of Victoria in
the dry February of 2009.Those fires
took out whole towns, and 174 people died.

This one must have
been as big as the smoke column promised -within a half hourI could hear the fire-trucks screaming toward
the fire.But it couldn't be anything
too bad - so I finished my lunch(oh, I
will miss those two-hour lunch breaks when I’m back in Brisbane, andas likely as not, not taking a single break
all day, and lunching on a power bar, if I remembered to stash one in a
pocket….)and wandered back to the
clinic - where the sharing of information started.

There was a huge bushfire right on the edge of town, more or less directly across the highway
from the Hospital. The highway was closed, and traffic was not permitted
to leave or enter the town. You can imagine what this would have been
like for the road trains and the Gray Nomads, all on a tight schedule - but you
can imagine that it was much worse for us here in town!

There was a flurry
of activity from the Med Super and the GP registrar on call at the Hospital…
The Hospital was being evacuated! And this was news - A major Bushfire threatening a Major Rural Centre -
it went out on the television and the radio, and we were headline news all
across Australia.Which might be great
for Australia, but was not at all cheering for us.

Fortunately, there
were not too many inpatients in the hospital to be evacuated, but there are
quite a few residents in the nursing home section of the hospital.And what a day they had! It was the
most excitement they had had in years! Ambulances shuttled everyone
across to the newly completed Shire Council Hall, and we settled them all in
for the duration.

Over the afternoon,
the fire crews battled the flames, and eventually, they started to win.

The highway was
re-opened before dark.And no-one was
injured.

It was the hoped-for outcome, but it brought home the reality of how quickly things can go
wrong out here-big fires can eat
towns, and all you can do is hang on, and hope that you will ride it out! Before the end of
the day, the fire was under control and the patients were back in the Hospital
(shuttled back again in ambulances). They had spent about 3 hours total
in our makeshift wards and jury-rigged ER, and they talked about it for days - and
will probably continue to do so for months!

About Me

I am an Australian architect, married to a Canadian who followed me home.
In September 2011 we relocated from rural South Australia to the bustling metropolis of Santiago, Chile, where it's warmer than Canada, but less insect-y than Australia.
How's that for a compromise?